This post is the third in a series that Sarah Campbell, an intern with FSN, will be doing around the International Year of Family Farming this summer, gathering stories of family farming from around the Avalon Peninsula. Look for more stories in the coming weeks! Last weekend I was happy to be able to speak with Jeremy Carter of Nagels Hill Agri-Products, both at the kitchen table and out in the fields. Below you'll find audio recordings of our conversation as well as photographs from the field. I really enjoyed chatting with Jeremy about the business of farming and his work as a farmer – take a listen! I hope you enjoy it as well.

The land Jeremy farms is maybe most known as being the home of Mount Scio Savoury – a business which Jeremy's father started back in the 1960s. It has been in the family since Jeremy's great-grandmother bought a piece of land on Mt. Scio Rd. back in the early part of the 1900s. The family has bought up fields here and there over the years to expand it to the size it is today.

“Numerous experiments, that’s the nature of farming.”

Jeremy himself started farming, as he says, “seriously,” in 1986. From a farm focused on savoury, Jeremy has made the transition to one growing a diversity of crops – “about a dozen.” This allows him to have more security in the face of unpredictable weather and markets. It's this type of problem-solving and willingness to adapt to changing circumstances that farming needs, for him: “There's almost always another way […] that's what fun about it – figuring these things out. […] Numerous experiments, that’s the nature of farming.”

He spoke to me about the importance of “devis[ing] […] system[s]” to solve problems, as well as the need for adaptation, experimentation, and “ingenuity.” Not to mention the fact that Jeremy is, like a lot of the farmers that I’ve met, a dyed-in-the-wool “pack-rat” (the better to have odds and ends to devise creative systems with!).

All of this underlines what seems to be a truth of farming – that it is the business of thriving in an ever-changing world, which farmers do and have done by being resilient, creative, and having a mind for adaptation.

“This is the bean experiment I was talking about. See there’s a bean there, and then there’s one there, and I don’t know if there’s really much of anything in between. I planted a lot, right, but that’s all that damp cold weather we had, the beans just don’t… Oh, there’s one there. See, it didn’t really, it’s not really doing so well… If I’d’ve transplanted them, I could have had a full row.”

“That’s scallop shells that Peter from Raymond’s, he wondered if I had any use for them, and being a pack-rat
I thought, well maybe. It is a source of calcium for your soil, right, it’s just it’s very long-term.”

“The French shallots don’t flower. The seed shallots do flower. […] The French shallots […] you can see they’re sort of a purple colour. […] [It’s] an ongoing thing I’ve been fooling around with for a few years. […] Shallots are wonderful.”

“I run a bit of heat to get it started, but […] the way I run the greenhouses it’s just passive solar heat.” “And it’s warm.” “Yeah, it’s a lot of heat.”

“I guess the plastic probably gets ripped over the winter?” “It does, yeah. I keep changing the way I arrange [it]. Trouble is, it’s very windy here, as you’ve probably noticed, and so structures – it’s an Ontario company that does this, it’s not really designed to withstand the amount of wind that we have. So that’s kind of been a big thing over the last few years, to try to figure out what I need to do to resist the wind. So what I’ve started doing is putting more [tracking wire] on the arches so that there’s more points of attachment […] That should improve it. We’ll know after next winter, or storm season.”

“This is the reservoir. It gets kinda dry here sometimes. These are rocks off the field that we used to make a little dam. […] Remember I was saying that the soil doesn’t hold on to a lot of water so, although, you know, it’s kind of a wet place, once it gets dry your soil doesn’t have much reserve and it’s good to have some source of irrigation.”

“Oh, the wintertime. Do you do things in winter? Repairs, or?” “I do have another business that I’m involved in. […] That takes up more time in the winters. […] I heat with wood as well […] which is kind of a partial winter job. Especially last winter. […] That’s another whole interesting lifestyle.”